I Am Happiest When [No.12]

Posted by Jill Chivers in Happy

What if happiness wasn’t so hard?

For many years, without any kind of scrutiny or exploration to see if this was true, I believed that happiness was hard.

That happiness was a state to be acquired. A destination. An accomplishment. You struggled, and struggled, and possibly struggled some more. And then you got there – you landed in happiness!

How wrong I was.

And yet, it’s easy to understand why so many of still believe this to be true. There are so many messages – in the media, in the work of self-proclaimed success gurus, online everywhere we look, we’re told that there is a secret. There is a formula. It goes something like this: If we strive, if we struggle, if we stretch, strain and scramble… we’ll succeed. And then we’ll be happy.

And I’m here as a living testament to how untrue all of that is.

As always, this is an ongoing conversation. And my sincere hope is that my sharing of my experiments with happy will give you the idea to have your own experiments with happiness, and to discover what makes you happier, more often.

I am happiest when (#12):

I am tapping into my senses

I’m a tactile and tangible person – I like to touch things and I like things with form and shape. My husband tells me that when we’re in a store, I touch everything! (I think I’ve become unaware of how much I do this). I’m not so great with or interested in the theoretical or abstract – it has little meaning to me. But if you can touch it, taste it, feel it, see it, hear it and smell it – I’m there!